Spirituality Column #483
February 16, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Why God? Why?
By Bob Walters

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”–God to Isaiah, Isaiah 55:9

“Everybody’s ignorant, only on different subjects.” – Will Rogers

“Sometimes I guess there just aren’t enough rocks.” – Forrest Gump

One can survey contemporary cultural, political, academic, philosophical and social norms and with some justification ask, literally, “What the hell is going on?”

It takes a Christian worldview to ask that question properly.  I believe in a loving God above, Jesus Christ in our hearts, the Holy Spirit glowing in our souls, and Satan everywhere in our midst confusing, conniving, condemning, conspiring and often confounding the heavenly salvation that the Father, Son and Spirit have in store for us.

Satan meanwhile aggressively and consistently proffers hell – salvation’s opposite, the fiery death below instead of the glorious life above.  Here on earth Satan runs rampant with his vicious lordship, hell routinely breaking out all over.  History records and society continues to champion and dubiously reflect Satan’s agenda.

Not to ruin the ending, but Satan’s demise and the final victory of Christ and heaven are clearly described in the Bible’s book of Revelation.

That’s fine for the macrocosmic “otherness” of all Creation moaning amid man’s fallenness, awaiting God’s eternal destiny and unimaginable glory.  But microcosmically, personally and urgently we implore: “What about NOW, Lord?  What about ME???”  The Cosmos truly is too big for most of us to meld into a cogent, personal, compartmentalized concern.  But “My Life” problems are personally felt and comprehended.  We ask God, most sincerely, “Why?”

And we wait.

It’s sad, but in a way funny, how folks just naturally seem to have a more coherent, patient, conversational and less condemning relationship with Satan than with God.  Satan gets a pass while we shout at God for answers, plea for deliverance and demand immediate, personal evidence of His goodness.  God plainly is telling Isaiah that when we earnestly ask “Why?” God says, “You wouldn’t understand the answer.”

Boy, do humans hate that.

Fact is, humanity needs a bigger question than “Why?” and one is not forthcoming.  No matter how smart or ignorant we are on any given topic, humanity can’t seem to come up with a question that beats “Why?”  But even as that question falls short, God nonetheless provides scriptural truth that we are wise to find sufficient:

“Trust me; love my Son Jesus, love one another, forgive your enemies.”

We either find peace, comfort and satisfaction in that, or pick up another rock to hurl at what we perceive to be God’s injustice.

Careful, though.  Satan is never more than a stone’s throw away.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) avoids inhabiting glass houses.

Spirituality Column #482
February 9, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“You are to bring onto the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you.” – God to Noah, Genesis 6:19

News of the 21^st century’s latest politically correct, cultural insult – “binary” – was buried in a lower right hand corner of an inside page of an inside section of a recent weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Brighton College in England, it seems, abolished gender distinction in its mandatory male-female school uniforms comprised of slacks, blazers, shirts, ties and skirts.  Now any student can wear any uniform piece any time, depending upon how one is identifying, gender-wise, that day.  That’s being “gender fluid.”

If you object? You’re being “binary.”

The WSJ item, tucked away in placement obscurity, quoted British journalist Melanie Phillips in the U.K. Spectator offering the following morsel of common sense: “It’s dangerous to tell all children they’re ‘gender fluid.’”

“Once upon a time,” Phillips began, “‘binary’ was a mathematical term.  Now it is an insult on par with ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ or ‘homophobic,’ to be deployed as a weapon in our culture wars.  The enemy is anyone who maintains that there are men and there are women, and that the difference between them is fundamental.”

So, “binary” is the new thing you don’t want to be called.  I appreciate the linguistic heads-up for all of us who live as though God really, really wasn’t kidding when he made humans – and pretty much all animals – “male” and “female.”  “Binary,” Phillips points out, is a “distinction accepted by the vast majority of the human race.”

To that I say, “Amen.”  Before fairly recent days, I’m guessing the “gender fluidity” idea may have seemed too ridiculous to bother categorizing.  Men, women, male, female…is how things are, going back to the ark, Adam and Eve and Creation.  It’s how generations reproduce.  Darwin and his evolutionary progeny have never improved upon, nor replaced, “binary” reproduction.

Arrange the test tubes, laboratories, science, ethics, academics and social engineering any way you want – it still takes male parts and female parts to make baby parts.  Life isn’t “created” afresh; it’s regenerated, and the generators are male and female.  Only God “creates” life.

The man-woman thing is a cosmological, biological truth some wish to redefine as sociological, psychological fiction.  Gender confusion, same-sex sex, mixed sexual desires, etc., aren’t new; they are addressed in humanity’s best, oldest, most reliable handbook, the Bible.  And never, we note, in a way that suggests “gender fluidity” is a good or “fluid” option.

Our fullest humanity requires biological function in agreement with psychological identity; sacrificing either for the sake of the other moves humanity toward death, not life.

Walters’ (rlwcom@aol.com) point here is life, not choices.

Spirituality Column #481
February 2, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

This weekly Christian column has come together for publication 481 straight Tuesdays – more than nine years – without much political commentary.

Other than the occasional “teachable moments” where culture clearly gets God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, church, faith, hope, love, etc. – the really key stuff – egregiously wrong, very little political grist is offered here.  This is my opportunity to talk about Jesus.

I’m not shy about throwing in a relevant, timely, conversational reference to obviously secularized, God-insulting, Jesus denying, Spirit grieving machinations of the politically correct and socially outrageous silliness attendant to these modern / post-modern times.  But I don’t “do” politics or social issues here.  I’d rather focus on Jesus.

Few things we can actually touch or intellectually ingest help our focus on Jesus more than reading the Bible, studying the Bible, knowing the Bible, understanding the Bible and living the Bible.  The producers of The Bible TV miniseries three years ago – Mark Burnett and Roma Downey – explained their motivation, quoted in the Wall Street Journal March 1, 2013: “Westerners cannot be considered literate without a basic knowledge of this foundational text.”

Bingo.  I couldn’t agree more.  Yet sadly, cultural-wide, Bible literacy is waning.

Still, if one is going to quote the Bible, one should at least “get” what the Bible is saying.  It’s all too common – plus doctrinally misleading – to confuse, for example, contexts of Old Testament laws and New Testament grace.

Donald Trump stumbled into just such a faux pas last week talking to TV commentator Bill O’Reilly.  Millions of folks heard what Trump said, but I wonder how many caught Trump’s glaring mixed-metaphor Bible blunder.

O’Reilly asked Trump, who had been offended by Fox News, to consider “Christian forgiveness.”  Trump responded with “…it’s called ‘an eye for an eye.’”

Wittingly or not, Trump was quoting Jesus.  But the context was mistaken. In the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5, 6 and 7) Jesus famously mentions “…an eye for an eye…” (verse 5:38), citing a vengeful Old Testament law recorded in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, part of the Jewish “Torah,” the first five books of the Bible.

But  unless Trump, a professing Christian, was intentionally quoting the Torah – unlikely since the topic was Christian forgiveness – Trump unwittingly gave a Jewish answer to a Christian question.

The Christian answer appears in the next verse (5:39); “… turn the other cheek.”

Context errors, lamentably, are made even by Bible-reading, church-going Christians.  You cannot just insert Old Testament law into Christian forgiveness.  They rarely mix, do violence to Christian grace, and make one sound biblically illiterate.

And oh, how I pray that being biblically illiterate was politically incorrect.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) has opinions on politics, but trust in the Lord.

Spirituality Column #480
January 26, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker in the original 1977 Star Wars movie, “Episode IV: A New Hope.”

Newly-discovered and budding Jedi Knight Luke has just “used the Force” in his first “light saber” lesson when Jedi master and mentor Obi-Wan offers this world-enlarging encouragement.

Finally free of his remote, nothing-happening-here home planet, good-guy Luke is on a star ship speeding off to galactic adventure, personal discovery and legendary fame fighting the evil empire controlled by The Dark Side of the Force.  If you know the Star Wars movies, you know how that all goes.  And with the seventh movie just out, it’s still going.  Luke indeed finds a far larger world.

There’s no real need to over-think all the good vs. evil, salvation vs. destruction, love vs. hate imagery, symbols and metaphors in these movies.  Mostly Star Wars is fun; it’s about outer space and fighting the bad guys; about cool space ships, exotic worlds, mysterious powers and imaginative weaponry that still does basically the same, familiar things contemporary weapons do: shoot things and blow stuff up.

We can clearly perceive our plainly-human hopes, fears, failings and aspirations amid the movies’ glitzy alien characters, technical fantasy and stark morality.  There is family, fellowship and trust among Luke and his Good Side of the Force; there is slavery, power and treachery rampant in the Dark Side of the Force.

Ours is a modern world of ceaseless information and endless entertainment.  We note a global, generational human predilection – given the worldly influences in any age – that mankind tends to worship the wrong things.  We worship what we think will spare us anguish, make us comfortable, give us status, make life easier and generally gratify our physical hungers, spiritual thirsts and psychological appetites.  We think life is complete, but our satisfactions are superficial.

What we truly need is something that “The Force” in the Star Wars movies never offers, describes or claims to be: Love.  It is often said, and I believe it, that love is the most powerful force in the universe.  How ironic then that the one thing love cannot be, actually, is forced.  Love is about giving, not forcing.  Love is a tie that binds, certainly, but it can’t be coerced.  Love is the most complete – and forceful – of mysteries.

The Bible tells us “God is love” (1 John 4:8) and God “so loved the world that he gave his only son Jesus …” (John 3:16).  God’s love, you see, is the true force of good.

Want a larger world?   Jesus Christ is proof of how big God really is.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests baptism to step into a truly larger world.

Spirituality Column #479
January 19, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters
"And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” – on Jesus, Colossians 1:17

We are exploring the fantastical “Force” of Star Wars movie fame.  Laying aside for the moment blockbuster movies, a multi-media entertainment mega-franchise, outer space adventures and the familiar moral drama of Good vs. Evil, there truly is an unimaginably strong force in our known, created world that no one quite understands.

To wit: Why is it so hard to break up an atom?

Sure, science has been splitting atoms for going on 100 years.  The awesome force of the atomic bomb 70 years ago ended a great war and, stripping decades of shifting global geopolitical dynamics right down to its core, the reality of even more powerful hydrogen bombs kept other large-scale wars from happening even to this day.

But, backing up a moment, what holds those little suckers – atoms – together so tightly?  What makes nuclear energy so potent?  What, while we’re on the subject, holds “us” – our physical world and even our corporeal human person – together?

In the physical realm of gravity, strong forces, weak forces, Newtonian Laws, Planck’s constant, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and errant Cosmological Constant, Hubble’s “Red Shift,” the assumption-breaking antics of quantum physics, the technical ascendency of nanotechnology and mind-blowing advances of modern nuclear medicine … how can these little bitty things – atoms – be so inexplicably strong?

Well, the Apostle Paul tells us in Colossians 1:17, backed up by Genesis 1, Hebrews 1 and countless other less obvious places in the Bible:

In Jesus “…all things hold together.”  Jesus is the author of life (Acts 3:15) and has authority over all things (Romans 28:18). Jesus “upholds the universe by the Word of His power” (Hebrews 1:3).  That’s the job God assigned to Him.

So along come these terrifically entertaining (to many) Star Wars movies and the mythical “Force” of the Jedi Knights.  Though great fun and depicting familiar moral grist – the duality of good and evil – the Force teaches us less truth than we already know.

Fictional movies tickle our senses, and plenty of mysteries remain as to how things work and why things are.  Scientists will continue to report on the science of life and the forces of physics.  But the God part of “why things hold together” has been written for thousands of years.

The strongest force in all creation is Jesus Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) appreciates an email response sent last week from IU Law School professor, philosophy PhD, author and friend Dr. John Hill, who eruditely pointed out that modernist “Good and Evil as Equals” imagery of “The Force” mimics the early-centuries post-pagan Christian heresy of Manicheism. St. Augustine knew it well. Great observation, John.

Spirituality Column #478
January 12, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” – the Apostle Paul, 2 Timothy 4:4

Regardless whether one is entertained by the smashingly successful Star Wars movies over the decades, it’s hard to imagine anyone being utterly unfamiliar with “Luke Skywalker,” “Yoda,” “Darth Vader,” “Obi-Wan,” “Jedi Knights” or, of course, “The Force.” “Star Wars” movies inform modern Western cultural language.

I’ve seen them all, liked them all, own the first six movies on DVD, and saw “Episode VII, The Force Awakens” over Christmas break in IMAX 3D.  Great fun.  But this isn’t a movie review; it’s an observation and commentary on the mythical and limited Force vs. the truth and sufficiency of Jesus Christ.

And no, I do not think this is too dumb to discuss.  A lot about the Force, and the Jedi Knights’ cinematic access to it, is what many people wish religion actually were: a broad moral code with on-demand, personally actuated, telekinetic powers.

“Use the Force, Luke.”

Think about how that is very nearly identical, in an opposite kind of way, to a very common lament of Christian doubters: “What good is Jesus if He won’t give me what I want?”  The Force, apparently, gives the Jedi want they want, right now.  But the Jedi knights have problems too – they can’t control the intentions and actions of those imbued with the Dark Side of the Force.  They, like everyone else, have to fight.

Sounds familiar.  The Jedi code governing the use of the Force is to serve and protect others with humble, selfless courage.  That’s an unmistakable, if incomplete,  Jesus reference.  The Dark Side uses the Force for its own gain, glory and what appears to be an uncomplicated, unvarnished and uncompromising hatred of the Good Side.  That’s a starkly clear and complete allusion to Satan.

As noted last week, the Force is “…created by all living things.”  It’s easy to miss what that’s saying: the Force is created by life, it doesn’t create life.  So among many things missing from the Force is God, the Creator of all things including life, and the person of Jesus Christ, whom God placed in charge of Creation.  John 1:1-18 explains what Jesus is and, de facto, what the Force is not.

A temptation persists in society – as old as Adam and Eve and irrespective of Star Wars movies, novels, technology, education, entertainment or politics – to replace the Creator God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit of the Bible with a less powerful truth.

In Christ, so much more than “The Force” is with us.

Continued next week.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) realizes myths may express some truth, but the only complete truth is Jesus Christ.

Spirituality Column #477
January 5, 2016
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

By Bob Walters

“The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together …” – Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

Congratulations to the Star Wars entertainment juggernaut for its continuing commercial success and cultural omnipresence.

It’s coming up on 40 years.  The Force has definitely re-Awakened.

My first encounter with Star Wars was a long time ago and far, far away … well, 1977 and just up the road in my home town of Kokomo, Indiana.  For me it was a guy’s movie, not a date movie.  As Ron, Chuck and I, in our early 20s, watched the closing credits roll (Star Wars was the first movie not to have the credits at the beginning), I remember Chuck, like it was yesterday, sitting two seats over reflexively letting out a stunned, low but audible, “Wow ….”

It was that kind of movie.

In the years since, Ron and Chuck forged successful careers, respectively, as a physician (Dallas) and attorney (Minneapolis).  To my knowledge neither of them has ever dressed up as Darth Vader at a GenCon convention.  Nor have I.

But I have to admit that I pretty much memorized the first three movies (Episodes IV, V and VI), and that I actually liked the fourth one (1999’s much-maligned “Episode I: The Phantom Menace” with Jar Jar Binks, etc.).  Did you know that Jake Lloyd, the child actor who played Anakin Skywalker (later “Darth Vader) in “The Phantom Menace”, attended Carmel (Ind.) High School?  His photo was in my son’s 2005 yearbook.

But, I digress.  Let’s talk about the “Force” – what it is and what it’s not.

The Force is a wonderfully made-up fantasy device that animates a fictional cosmology – i.e., how things work – for a fictional universe in a fictional story.  Interesting thing about fiction, whether Dickens, Hemingway, Tolkien, Rowling or George Lucas, is how fiction generally reflects real truths and conflicts of human existence.  Without that humanizing familiarity, a story isn’t interesting; in fact, it’s not even a story.  So, fine; if it makes a good story, let the Force be with us.

What the Force is not, of course, is a salvation invitation.  “Hokie religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid” says cynical smuggler Han Solo to light-saber wielding and budding Jedi “Force” learner Luke Skywalker in the original movie.

 While portrayed as a religion having a good side and a “dark” (evil) side, the Force lacks components Christians should perceive as missing, but secularists won’t.

Here’s a Bible hint: read John 1:1-18.  More next week.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) owns all six prior Star Wars movies.